


touchstone

by badacts



Series: terra firma [1]
Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, concussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-04-09
Packaged: 2018-06-01 04:38:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6501142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/pseuds/badacts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s getting into his car at the apartment, and then there’s a referee crouched over him saying his name.  He sounds like he’s been repeating himself for a while.  Neil’s in full gear and flat on his back on the court floor with no recollection of even pulling into the court parking lot, just a grey blank space where those memories should be.</p><p>His head is killing him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	touchstone

**Author's Note:**

> There isn't enough fic for this series, so I wrote some, and I'm sorry for that because I am terrible!! Anyway, gratuitous hurt/comfort, please enjoy.

Injuries in Exy are a fact of life. Neil, for whom injuries have always been a fact of life anyway, will never entirely be _used_ to them, but the prevalence of them in his life has made them somewhat less of a big deal. He’s careful, usually, but care hadn’t prevented a sprained ankle and a broken forearm that needed plating during his time with the Foxes. Those injuries healed, and he knew they would even when they were fresh and painful.

This, though – this is something else.

He’s getting into his car at the apartment, and then there’s a referee crouched over him saying his name. He sounds like he’s been repeating himself for a while. Neil’s in full gear and flat on his back on the court floor with no recollection of even pulling into the court parking lot, just a grey blank space where those memories should be. Everything sounds like he’s underwater, slow and impenetrable.

His head is killing him.

“Move,” Laila says to the ref, which is probably going to at least get her a stern reprimand, but does get him out of Neil’s face. Neil isn’t close with his current team but Laila Dermott’s steadiness and ferocity he does like. She doesn’t look particularly steady right now – all that Trojan good will is wiped clean by anger that he doesn’t think is for him.

She says, “Jesus, Josten. Don’t move.” Despite this, she helps him fumble at his helmet and rolls him onto his side when moving makes him retch while the room spins blackly around him.

After that things move quickly. It becomes obvious that he can’t get up on his own and couldn’t walk even if he did, so pretty much the last thing he can remember for a while is being slid gently onto a stretcher until the spinning makes everything fade entirely.

He gets vague flashes, coming around to the soft slur of his own voice before he’s gone again. A whole bunch of people try to tell him things that he can’t make any sense of besides the odd word, and he pukes at least once. He gets loaded into a vehicle that he vaguely assumes is an ambulance, but the rocking of the road makes him black out completely for a bit again.

Things get clearer when he’s not moving anymore, but for a long moment the confusion takes over and blocks out every clear thought he’d been gripping with his fingernails up to now. _He doesn’t know where he is._ For a moment he’s waking in pain on the basement floor of his childhood home, with his father and death on the other side of the door. Still a runner at heart despite any running now limited to roadtrips in a luxury car, his blood arcs with electric adrenaline that he can’t control.

He’s hyperventilating like he hasn’t in years, each indrawn breath sending a spike of dizzy pain through his skull that only increases his panic. Someone grabs for his wrist, which is when he realises he’s halfway off of the gurney like he could go anywhere but onto the floor. He shakes off their grip and goes for a punch but his aim is completely shot.

“Let him go,” a familiar voice says – or snarls, anyway. The hands on him – arms, shoulders, wrists like handcuffs – disappear so that he falls back onto his ass on the gurney.

Andrew grasps him about the back of his neck and pulls his face into the front of his sweater, holding him there. Neil can’t stop himself from grabbing Andrew’s hips in the hope that that might steady him, his grip too tight to not convey desperation in case Andrew hasn’t already gathered that.

Andrew says, “Breathe, Neil.”

The inside of Neil’s head is white hot like an imploding star, but Andrew’s firm and familiar shape under his hands does make his heart quake a little less. He manages a good breath in, and then another, though they shudder on the way out. He feels like he might cry, which isn’t him and which he kind of hopes is a result of the head injury.

Andrew is talking to someone else over his head, sounding like his usual barely civil self but calm. Neil’s probably lost time again, but it’s hard to know whether that’s his concussion or the panic attack. Andrew’s voice is easier to understand the unfamiliar ones of the doctors.

He’s saying, “Yes. Not often. Yes, he has specific triggers.”

“We want to get him a CT scan done, but we don’t want to risk him panicking again. Can you get him to lie back?” someone else asks.

Rafael, the team’s doctor, who Neil hadn’t even realised was in the room, says something about sedation. Andrew pushes him back lightly, keeping his hand clamped on the back of Neil’s neck even after he’s back on his side. It’s – grounding, the only familiar thing in a stormy sea of triggers and unknowns that his brain can’t compute right now. Neil sighs a little, reaching up a hand to Andrew’s so he can brush his fingers over it. He feels like the bad kind of drunk, out of control enough his hand wavers in the air. Andrew catches it, squeezes it, and then puts it back down.

An unfamiliar hand takes his other wrist, and this time he doesn’t try to punch them. They put a needle into the delicate crook of his elbow and after about a minute he’s asleep.

 

* * *

 

When he wakes up again, his head hurts a lot less and his eyes manage to make sense of both the fact that it’s light and that Andrew is sitting in a chair beside his bed, a silent sentinel staring out the window. He remembers most of what happened between regaining consciousness on the court and being sedated, but he feels a little sick to his stomach just thinking about the dark and wavering world he’d been reduced to.

He rolls tentatively onto his side, pillowing his face on one hand. The entire back of his skull feels deeply bruised and it’s good to take the weight off of it. His stomach doesn’t rebel either, although the nausea is a creeping threat that he wouldn’t like to test while his mouth still tastes like something died in it. His brain is far from working at its usual pace; his observations of the room are clouded with the soft hand of confusion.

His movement attracts Andrew’s attention, who just looks at him until he goes still again. He looks calm, unbothered, an oasis in a storm that wipes out the last of Neil’s concerns through the dizzy lack of comprehension dogging him.

“What happened?” Neil asks with a tiny bit of a slur. He swallows, not liking that tiny loss of control any more than the bigger ones.

“Wilson hit you,” Andrew says, and he sounds inexplicably angry about it. It’s not that he doesn’t ever get angry over Neil now, but he usually saves it for things that aren’t Exy-related. Exy-related emotions are usually limited to irritation and vague satisfaction. “Full body check, he bounced your skull off the wall. It looked intentional. I suspect Alvarez broke his face for you, too. What is it like, inspiring that kind of loyalty in people?”

“Andrew,” Neil says, a little more clearly and managing to convey the fact that this isn’t really the time for Andrew to use large words, never mind make fun of Neil. He mostly sounds irritated, which is fair, because he is. Andrew raises an eyebrow at him in response.

“You’re going to be fine,” Andrew says instead. “They want to do a few follow-up neurological exams and then they’ll let you go.”

“How long off?” Neil asks, blinking slowly. The light isn’t doing anything for his headache, so he lets himself close his eyes for a while.

Andrew huffs a little, somewhere between a snort of disgust and a growl. “You’ll have to take that up with your doctor, Josten.” Neil allows himself the luxury of rolling his eyes behind closed eyelids.

“Were you watching the game?” he asks eventually. Andrew had been playing with his team an hour away this week, and had come to spend the weekend in Neil’s apartment before going back to his own. It had meant a flight home for him after leaving his team to travel back by bus without him, but it had seemed worth it to both of them at the time. Now that Neil is going to spend the next however long functionally useless, he can’t really imagine that it’s going to be particularly enjoyable.

“Why, were you wondering who won?” Andrew mocks. It’s as much of an answer as Neil is going to get. Andrew had sprained his wrist in an idiotic foul on him his first year as a pro, and Neil had panicked enough watching the game on television that some of the Foxes still make fun of him via text. It’s hard to watch someone you care about getting hurt, and harder to watch knowing that there isn’t anything you can do about it. Hence Andrew’s anger earlier, Neil supposes.

“You got here quickly,” Neil comments, in a tone that should sound arch but really only hits grateful. It’s a little embarrassing.

“It isn’t like you would know. You didn’t know up from down,” Andrew replies, though his voice has gone lower – as close to soft as it ever gets, when it takes on the rasp that Neil likes so much. He clarifies, “Your team doctor rang me. Apparently you were being problematic.”

Neil doesn’t remember exactly when he was being problematic enough that Raphael felt he needed to call in back up, but he’s been called that enough times in his life that he can shrug it off. However, he also doesn’t remember any point where Raphael might have had any idea about Neil and Andrew.

“Did I tell him to?” Neil asks before he can stop himself, opening his eyes so he can look at Andrew’s face.

“Not everyone is oblivious as you,” Andrew says, unbothered by Neil looking at him. He doesn’t look like he’s lying, but it is sometimes kind of hard to tell. “Probably Dermott told him to. She just about carried you off the court herself.”

Neil shrugs a little, making the sheets ripple. There’s a sunbeam falling straight across his legs from the narrow window, and the warmth is soothing despite the way his neck muscles are hard as iron and his skull feels like someone’s hammering on the inside of it. They fall into comfortable silence while Neil evaluates whether he’s going to fall asleep again and Andrew returns to looking out the window.

“You should go. Home, I mean. Change your flight,” Neil says eventually, surprising himself. His thoughts have jumped back to Andrew being here, another all-too-brief trip between games for both of them. Before this they haven’t seen each other in six weeks, since Neil had flown up to Andrew’s current hometown on a Tuesday night and back very early on the Thursday morning of the same week. It’s been – tiring, but necessary, and also worth it to be together even for such a short period of time.

Andrew looks back at him, still expressionless other than the slightest twist to his mouth, a snarl that hasn’t made it beyond exasperation.

“I’m not going to go,” he replies, as though that should be obvious to Neil. It probably should be. If their positions were reversed, Andrew would have to lever Neil out the door of his apartment with a racquet. Neil has always been the more obsessive one of the two of them when it comes to their shared career, but he is mature enough now to recognise that Andrew cares more about Neil than he does Exy, and to recognise that that’s a good thing.

“You sure?” Neil asks, squashing himself down against the pillow. Now that that’s settled the churning in his belly has eased, and sleep sounds like a good way to ease the lingering aches and pains until a doctor comes and cuts him loose.

“I’m sure,” Andrew replies, voice gone rough again, and it’s the last thing that Neil hears for a while.

**Author's Note:**

> Lets be real, Kevin probably rings Andrew after watching the game, and the first thing he asks is how long Neil will be off the court. Andrew hangs up on him immediately.


End file.
